SEAS & IDEA 2004

Many school districts ask how the IDEA 04 Reauthorization changes will impact their SEAS system. Other school districts, unsure as to what will change, are hesitant about moving to a new solution until the regulations are published and completely interpreted.

Fortunately for our customers, the SEAS solution was designed with changes, updates, and customization in mind. This means that changes mandated by new regulations are quickly and easily incorporated into the program.

Form Changes

Our customers greatly benefit from the fact that SEAS is a form-based system. Form changes, especially regulatory, are quickly accommodated, usually in a matter of days.

One example of our ability to quickly and efficiently accommodate form changes can be found in Arkansas. In early February of 2005, the Arkansas State Department of Education invited CAS to Little Rock to discuss upcoming form changes due to IDEA 04. By the end of February, only 2 weeks later, all programming and forms changes were completed and deployed to Arkansas schools.

Federal IEP Model Forms

As part of the IDEA 04 legislation, the federal OSEP office is required to publish "model" IEP forms. These forms are expected to be released sometime in the Fall/Winter of 2005-2006, after the regulations have been finalized and published.

You can rest assured that when the federal model forms are released, we will immediately incorporate them into SEAS. It has always been our commitment to our customers to include state published or mandated forms at no extra cost, and we will be extending this policy to the federal model forms as well. You can anticipate them being included in the SEAS system within two weeks of their publication date.